R.E.M.
(Warner Bros.)
R.E.M. have been doing a lot of self-reckoning lately. In the past few years, they have released one studio album of new material, along with their first-ever live album, a 2xCD greatest hits, and reissues of their first two albums packaged with contemporaneous live shows. It’s been a pretty hectic, almost desperate argument for their continued relevance after a string of misguided attempts to expand and redefine their sound. As a new generation asks why they should care about a band that hasn’t been on top of their game in a dozen years, R.E.M. have countered with a pretty constant flow of catalog releases. Granted, Murmur and “So. Central Rain” don’t get old, and Accelerate was actually really good, so who’s to complain (too much) if the band want to move forward while looking backwards?
Even with the most beneficial of doubts, their new Live at the Olympia in Dublin: 39 Songs seems a bit suspect. Like Live in 2007, it’s a double-live album, recorded in Ireland. Any casual record buyer would be forgiven for getting the two releases confused and asking, Why other? But there’s a major difference here: Live, for all it’s first-ever-R.E.M.-live-album headline grabbing, focused almost exclusively on their most recent (read: post-Bill Berry) albums, career nadir Around the Sun in particular, cramming the setlist with also-ran hits and never-were favorites. It was as disappointing as anything they’ve released this decade.
Live at the Olympia, on the other hand, has a recognizable retrospective flavor to it, with the band mixing in really old songs with really new ones: Chronic Town with Accelerate, Reckoning with New Adventures in Hi-Fi, and so on. Billed as “This Is Not a Show,” the run of nights at the Olympia were meant to live-test songs for Accelerate and revive old numbers with little rehearsal, this release isn’t simply a legacy-shaping ploy or a fan-soliciting gesture, but it sounds like they are engaging anew with their own history and, by extension, with themselves, which is refreshing after the quartet-minus-one (like U2) swore off their old material sometime during the 1990s, before their new material went belly up. So this is three middle-aged men trying to figure out how the hell they got here, and their only clues are buried deep in “These Days” and “Carnival of Sorts (Boxcars).”
What’s surprising about Live at the Olympia is how good these very different songs sound together, how dynamically they compliment one another by emphasizing the nuance and intelligence—both musical and lyrical—from each stage and album of their career. Following opener “Living Well Is the Best Revenge,” “Second Guessing” sounds like it could have come from last year’s Accelerate instead of 1984’s Reckoning. Likewise, “Houston,” “Cuyahoga,” and “Electrolite” comprise a cross-continental travelogue despite more than the decade between each song. Recent songs like “Man-Sized Wreath” and “Disguised” (better known as “Supernatural Superserious”) are shown to have new mystery, while old songs like “Wolves, Lower” and “Sitting Still” are laud naked and plain.
To their credit, R.E.M. do and do not make it look easy, summoning more energy and charisma than they did on Live. But between songs, Stipe makes it clear that they’re flying by the seat of their collective pants, joking about his lyrics sheets (he apparently had to Google his own lyrics, which is a charming testament to the unlikely, unwieldy immensity of their catalog) and introducing songs like “Circus Envy” by telling the audience that it hasn’t been performed in a dozen years. “This one’s easy,” he says by way of introducing “So. Central Rain,” but when the audience cheers, he settles them back down: “Don’t get ahead of yourselves.” He laughs off a flub on a strictly 55-mph version of “Drive,” and says “Kohoutek” “is absolutely terrifying for us.” There’s a candor here that’s refreshing, as if they’ve lowered their sights a bit, no longer trying to be the Best Band in the World (a ‘90s concept rendered obsolete by the Internet) but seemingly content to be the Best Band at the Olympia. Perhaps this double album is a signal that R.E.M. is ready to be a cult band again. These guys might just have a future after all.
Standout Tracks: “Kohoutek,” “Living Well Is the Best Revenge,” “West of the Fields,” “Cuoyahoga” STEPHEN M. DEUSNER
